Why I'm Using Movable Type

I thought I’d show how I narrowed down my decision on choosing my blogging software for andablog.

1. Word of Mouth

The first thing I started with was general research on all available options for creating the site I did old school research. I needed to know what was popular, what people where using, which software had a buzz factor to it. Another factor that falls into this category is if the website/publisher is English. This gave me a list of about 30+ choices of Content Management Systems (CMS) or blog software. The biggest winner in this was wordpress, I couldn't go anywhere where someone wasn't say omg your going to use Wordpress, right?

Available Options: Drupal, Expression Engine, CakePHP, Wordpress, Wordpress MU, Blogger, Vox, Typepad, LiveJournal, Joomba/Mambo, phpNuke, Presstopia, Roller, Movable Type., +many more.

2. Hosted Solution

One thing that I knew right out of the box, was that I wanted a solution that wasn’t a service such as Blogger or Vox. Those are not as customizable as I was looking for as a developer, to me they are the myspace of blogging. I have this personal vendetta I think against myspace, I think it’s the dumbest thing ever. What it’s trying to achieve is actually a good idea….a network for those to voice opinions/show off ect….this is why I think blogging has become so popular. People like to talk and be heard. I mean that’s ultimately why I’m blogging here today. But back to myspace, they fucked up royally, their designs/customization makes 80% of it complete garbage and totally unusable. I feel blogger/vox and similar systems are good, but only to a point. So my solution, had to be a solution located on my own web host. This gave me an initial list of about 20 choices of which I had to individually eliminate from using.

Available Options: Drupal, b2Evolution, Expression Engine, CakePHP, Wordpress, Wordpress MU, Joomba/Mambo, phpNuke, Presstopia, Roller, Movable Type., +many more.

3. PHP Friendly

I’m not a hard core coding developer, I’m not building Perl scripts or working with .NET architecture on any sort of daily basis. I’m a web developer, who knows enough programming to get some basics to work. I understand basic programming structures, such as if/case/loops, ect…but I’m not going to build a blog without some sort of help. Of all the languages out there, I feel most comfortable with PHP, and that’s only because I learned Flash ActionScript whose syntax happens to be very similar. Not that I’m a coding racist, but that’s what I know, so that’s what I stuck with.

Available Options: Drupal, b2Evolution, Expression Engine, CakePHP, Wordpress, Wordpress MU, Joomba/Mambo, phpNuke, Movable Type., +many more.

4. Multiblog

With andablog, we wanted to utilize different sub domains for each user and then aggregate all there blogs for the home page. I was actually really surprised on how many other CMSs didn‘t allow people to create more than 1 blog. This is probably one of the single most important factors in eliminating options. This single factor caused me to eliminate the most commonly used web log that had a huge support base on it. Bub bye Wordpress. If this wasn’t a network of blogs, we probably would have ended up with Wordpress as our solution.

Available Options: Drupal, b2Evolution, Expression Engine, CakePHP, Wordpress MU, Joomba/Mambo, phpNuke, and Movable Type.

5. Time to Implement

I am a working professional, I realized that I had time to develop/customize a web log. I couldn’t afford the time to build it completely from scratch, I needed some base functionality rebuilt. I’d love to say I built the entire system from scratch. I do have a professional life that requires me at the current time to get this blog up and running in a matter of weeks, rather than months. A few other options had to leave the list mainly due to amount of time it would take to implement those systems due to my unfamiliarity with coding with them.

Available Options: Expression Engine, Wordpress MU, Joomba/Mambo, phpNuke, and Movable Type.

6. Ability to Customize

This was probably the second most important factor in my final blog decision. I will say that of all the systems out there, Expression Engine wins this hands down. If you are a developer and know how to code html and php and you only need a single personal website, it gets my vote hands down. Hell even if you purchase a commercial copy, I think it should be worth considering despite the fact that it isn’t free.

Available Options: Expression Engine, Wordpress MU, and Movable Type.

7. Price/Cost to Implement

Speaking of price, it’s not that I didn’t consider spending money for something if it fit my needs, but it did cause me to narrow down my choices based off of cost. Currently at work we are utilizing Expression Engine to work with some of our blogs and foreign language sites. It does a good job at everything we were looking for with a system, however the pricing for mass multiple blogs was going to shoot up astronomically.

Available Options: Wordpress MU, and Movable Type.

8. Support/Local Testing

So now I was down to utilizing both Wordpress MU (Multi User) and Movable Type on a development server. Well actually I only tested Wordpress as Wordpress MU would not install properly on my server. After asking a few questions on some forums for both software I was almost 100% sold on utilizing Wordpress MU even though I couldn’t install it on my server. I mean Movable Type was written in that icky Perl while Wordpress was lovely PHP. Ultimately it comes down to if it’s available in 1 it seems to be available in other, via plug ins. But in the end, it came down to built in features: things like openID integration and cross-blog aggregation sold me on my final decision.

Final Decision: Movable Type

Tagged with: MT